The Tortilla Curtain (26 page)

All that was fine, but he was drunk. Drunk for a purpose, for a reason. Drunk because he was fed up with the whole yankee gringo dog-eat-dog world where a poor man had to fight like a conquering hero just to keep from starving to death, drunk because after three weeks of on-again, off-again work and the promise of something better, Al Lopez had let him go. Rigoberto’s brother, the one who’d been ill, was back from his sickbed and ready to work. A hernia, that’s what he had, and he’d gone to the gringo doctors to sew it up, and that was all right, because he had papers,
la tarjeta
verde, and he was legal. Cándido was not. “Haven’t I done good work?” he asked Al Lopez. “Haven’t I run after everything you told me to do like a human
burro,
haven’t I busted my balls?” “Yes, sure,” Al Lopez had said, “but that’s not the problem. You don’t have papers and Ignacio does. I could get in trouble. Big trouble.” And so Cándido had bought the sausages and the wine and come home drunk with the dress and the shorts in a paper bag, and he was drunk now and getting drunker.

In three weeks, he’d made nearly three hundred dollars, minus some for food and the first dress he’d bought America, the pretty one, from the gringo store. That left him just over two hundred and fifty dollars, which was half what he’d need for a car and a quarter what he’d need for a decent apartment, because they all—even the Mexican landlords—wanted first and last months’ rent and a deposit too. The money was buried in a plastic peanut butter jar under a rock behind the wrecked car and he didn’t know how he was going to be able to add to it. He’d only got work once when Al Lopez hadn’t come for him, and that was just half a day at three dollars an hour, hauling rock for a wall some old lady was building around her property. It was the end of July. The dry weather would hold for four months more, and by then América would have had her baby—his son—and they would have to have a roof over their heads. The thought darkened his mood and when America stepped into the firelight to show off the big shorts with her jaguar’s smile, he snapped at her.

“Those
vagos,”
he said, and the tongue was so thick in his throat he might have swallowed a snake, “they took more than just your money, didn’t they? Didn’t they?”

Her face went numb. “You go to hell,” she said.
“Borracho.
I told you, I told you a thousand times,” and she turned away and hid herself in the hut.

He didn’t blame her. But he was drunk and angry and he wanted to hurt her, wanted to hurt himself, twisting the knowledge round and round his brain like a rotten tooth rotated in its socket. How could he pretend not to know what had happened? How could he allow himself to be fooled? She hadn’t let him touch her in three weeks, and why was that? The baby, she claimed. She felt sick. She had a headache. Her digestion wasn’t right, no, Cándido, no ... well, maybe it was true. But if he ever found that son of a bitch with the raw eyes and that stupid
pinche
baseball cap... and he looked for him too, everywhere, every time Al’s truck took a turn and there was somebody there beside the road, a pair of shoulders, a cap, blue jeans and a stranger’s face... Cándido knew what he would do when he found him, his fist pounding on the window till the truck stopped, the
vago
loping up to the truck for a ride, his lucky day, and the first thing Cándido could lay his hands oh, the big sledge for driving stakes, the machete for clearing brush, and if he went to prison for a hundred years it would be sweet compared to this...

If she was lying to him it was to spare him, he knew that, and his heart turned over for her in his drunkenness. Seventeen years old, and she was the one who’d found work when he couldn’t, she was the one who’d had them sniffing after her like dogs, she was the one whose husband made her live in a hut of sticks and then called her a liar, a whore and worse. But as he lay there watching the sparks climb into the sky, the wine infesting his veins, he knew how it was going to be, how it had to be, knew he would follow her into that hut and slap his own pain out of her, and that was so sick and so bad he wanted nothing more in that moment than to die.

But then dead men didn’t work either, did they?

SMOKE ROSE FROM THE BARBECUE IN FRAGRANT ginger-smelling tufts as Delaney basted the tofu kebabs with his special honey-ginger marinade and Jordan chased a ball round the yard with Osbert yapping at his heels. Kyra was stretched out by the pool, having finished up her jog with forty laps of the crawl and her weekly glass of Chardonnay, and though her briefcase stood at her side, she seemed for the moment to be content with contemplating the underside of her eyelids. It was a Sunday in mid-August, seven in the evening, the sun fixed in the sky like a Japanese lantern. There was music playing somewhere, a slow moody piano piece moving from one lingering faintly heard note to the next, and when Delaney looked up from turning the kebabs he watched a California gnatcatcher—that rare and magical gray-bodied little bird—settle on the topmost wire of the fence. It was one of those special moments when all the mad chittering whirl of things suddenly quits, like a freeze-frame in a film, and Delaney held on to it, savored it, even as the fragrance of ginger faded into the air, the piano faltered and the bird shot away into nothingness. Things had been tough there for a while, what with the accident, the loss of Sacheverell, the theft of his car, but now life had settled back onto an easy even keel, a mundanity that allowed the little things to reveal themselves, and he was grateful for it.

“Is it ready yet?” Kyra called in a smoky languorous voice. “Do you want me to put the dressing on the salad?”

“Yes, sure, that would be great,” he said, and he felt blissful, rapturous even, as he watched his wife swing her legs over the side of the chair, adjust the straps of her swimsuit and stride gracefully across the patio and into the rear of the house.

At dinner, which Delaney served on the glass-topped table by the pool, Kyra filled her glass with Perrier and announced, with a self-deprecating giggle, that she’d “cleaned up Shoup.” Jordan was toying with his tofu, separating it from the mushrooms, the mushrooms from the tomatoes and the tomatoes from the onions. Osbert was under the table, gnawing at a rawhide bone. “What?” Delaney said. “What do you mean?”

Kyra looked down at her plate as if uncertain how to go on. “Remember I told you about all those people gathering there on the streetcorners—day laborers?”

“Mexicans,” Delaney said, and there was no hesitation anymore, no reluctance to identify people by their ethnicity, no overlay of liberal-humanist guilt. Mexicans, there were Mexicans everywhere.

“Mexicans,” Kyra confirmed with a nod. Beside her, Jordan stuffed a forkful of white rice in his mouth, chewed thoughtfully a moment and extruded a glistening white paste back onto the tines of his fork. “I don’t know,” Kyra went on, “it was a couple of weeks ago, remember? By the 7-Eleven there?”

Delaney nodded, dimly remembering.

“Well I got on Mike’s case about it because when it gets to be a certain number—ten maybe, ten is okay, but any more than that and you can see the buyers flinch when you drive by. That’s the sort of thing they’re moving out here to get away from, and you know me, I’ll go out of my way, the most circuitous route, to give people a good impression of the neighborhood, but sometimes you just have to take the boulevard, it’s unavoidable. Anyway, I don’t know what happened, but one day I suddenly realize there’s like fifty or sixty of them out there, all stretched out up and down the block, sitting on the sidewalk, leaning up against the walls, so I said to Mike, ‘We’ve got to do something,’ and he got on the phone to Sid Wasserman and I don’t know what Wasserman did but that streetcorner is deserted now, I mean deserted.”

Delaney didn’t know what to say. He was wrestling with his feelings, trying to reconcile the theoretical and the actual. Those people had every right to gather on that streetcorner—it was their inalienable right, guaranteed by the Constitution. But whose constitution—Mexico’s? Did Mexico even have a constitution? But that was cynical too and he corrected himself: he was assuming they were illegals, but even illegals had rights under the Constitution, and what if they were legal, citizens of the U.S.A., what then?

“I mean,” Kyra was saying, lifting a morsel of tofu and oyster mushroom to her lips, “I’m not proud of it or anything—and I know how you feel and I agree that everybody’s got a right to work and have a decent standard of living, but there’s just so many of them, they’ve overwhelmed us, the schools, welfare, the prisons and now the streets...” She chewed thoughtfully. Took a sip of water. “Oh, by the way, did I tell you Cynthia Sinclair got engaged? At the office?” She laughed, a little trill, and set her fork down. “I don’t know what made me think of it—prisons?” She laughed again and Delaney couldn’t help joining in. “Sure. Prisons. That was it.”

And then she began to fill him in on Cynthia Sinclair and her fiancé and all the small details of her education, work habits and aspirations, but Delaney wasn’t listening. What she’d said about cleaning up the streetcorner had struck a chord, and it brought him back to the meeting he’d attended with Jack two nights ago. Or it wasn’t a meeting actually, but a social gathering—“A few guys getting together for a drink,” as Jack put it.

 

 

 

Jack had come in the door just after seven, in a pair of shorts—white, and perfectly pressed, of course—and an Izod shirt, and he and Delaney walked down the block and up two streets to Via Mariposa in the golden glow of evening. Jack hadn’t told him where they were going—“Just over to a neighbor’s house, a friend, a guy I’ve been wanting you to meet”—and as they strolled past the familiar sprawling Spanish-style homes, the walk took on the aspect of an adventure for Delaney. He and Jack were talking about everything under the sun—the Dodgers, lawn care, the situation in South Africa, the great horned owl that had taken a kitten off the Corbissons’ roof—and yet Delaney couldn’t help wondering what the whole thing was about. What friend? What neighbor? While he barely knew half the people-in the community, he was fairly confident he knew everybody in Jack’s circle, the ones in Arroyo Blanco, anyway.

But then they came to a house at the very end of Via Mariposa, where the road gave out and the hills rose in a wedge above the roof-line, and Delaney realized he had no idea who lived here. He’d been by the place a hundred times, walking the dog, taking the air, and had never really paid much attention to it one way or the other: it was just a house. Same model as his own place, only the garage was reversed, and instead of Rancho White with Navajo trim, the owner had reversed the colors too, going with the lighter shade for the trim and the darker for the stucco. The landscaping was unremarkable, no different from any of the other places on the block: two tongues of lawn on either side of a crushed stone path, shrubs that weren’t as drought-tolerant as they should be, a flagpole draped with a limp flag and a single fat starling perched atop it like a clot of something wiped on a sleeve.

“Whose place is this?” he asked Jack as they came up the walk.

“Dominick Flood’s.”

Delaney shot him a glance. “Don’t think I know him.”

“You should,” Jack said over his shoulder, and that was all.

A maid showed them in. She was small, neat, with an untraceable accent and a tight black uniform with white trim and a little white apron Delaney found excessive: who would dress a servant up like somebody’s idea of a servant, like something out of a movie? What was the point? They followed her down a corridor of genuine hand-troweled plaster, spare and bright, past a pair of rooms furnished in a Southwestern motif, Navajo blankets on the walls, heavy bleached-pine furniture, big clay pots of cactus and succulents, floors of unglazed tile. At the rear of the house, in the room Delaney used for his study, was a den with a wet bar, and eight men were gathered round it, drinks in hand. They were noisy and grew noisier when Jack stepped into the room, turning to him as one with shouts of greeting. Delaney recognized Jack Cherrystone and the bearded fat man from the meeting—Jim Shirley—and two or three others, though he couldn’t place their names.

“Jack!” a voice cried out behind them and Delaney turned to see the man he presumed to be their host coming up the hallway. Flood looked to be about sixty, tanned and hard as a walnut, with close-set eyes and a tight artificial weave of white hair swept back from his brow. He was barefooted, in a pair of shorts and an oversized Hawaiian-print shirt, and it was impossible not to notice the device on his ankle. It was a black plastic box, two inches square, and it clung tight to the flesh like some sort of high-tech parasite. A thick elastic strap held it in place.

“Dom,” Jack sang, shaking the older man’s hand, and then he turned to introduce Delaney.

“The naturalist,” Flood said without irony, and fixed him with a narrow look. “Jack’s told me all about you. And of course I follow your column in
Wide Open Spaces,
terrific stuff, terrific.”

Delaney made a noise of demurral. “I didn’t think anybody really paid that much attention—”

“I subscribe to them all,” Flood said, “—
Nature, High Sierra, The Tule Times,
even some of the more radical newsletters. To me, there’s nothing more important than the environment—hey, where would we be without it, floating in space?”

Delaney laughed.

“Besides, I have a lot of time on my hands”—at this, they both glanced down at the box on his ankle and Delaney had his first intimation of just what its function might be—“and reading sustains me, on all issues. But come on in and have a drink,” he was saying, already in motion, and a moment later they were standing at the bar with the others while a man in a blue satin jacket and bow tie fixed their drinks—Scotch, no ice, for Jack, and a glass of sauvignon blanc for Delaney.

It was a convivial evening, a social gathering and nothing more—at least for the first hour—and Delaney had begun to enjoy himself, set at ease immediately by his host’s praise and the easy familiarity of the others—they were his neighbors, after all—when the smaller conversations began to be subsumed in a larger one, and the theme of the evening gradually began to reveal itself. Jim Shirley, sweating and huge in a Disneyland T-shirt, was leaning forward on the sofa with a drink in his hand, addressing Bill Vogel and Charlie Tillerman, the two men Delaney had recognized on entering, and the room fell silent to pick up his words. “Go unlisted, that’s what I say. And I’m going to raise the issue at the next community meeting, just to warn everybody—”